Put to the test

20 April 2002 — 10:00am

The conversations usually begin with a familiar disclaimer. "I'm not being racist, but ..." and then plough deep into a minefield of ethnicity, parental aspirations thwarted, middle-class competitiveness and deep-seated fears and concerns about childhoods won or lost. For many Sydney households with primary school age children, it is a debate which rebounds around the dinner table, consuming anxious hours as mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, sons and daughters, even visiting friends wrestle with its emotional contours.

It's about a much-prized entree to one of the state's premier government schools, but increasingly it's also about attitudes, tolerance and the ethnic divides that run like fault lines through Sydney society.

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The debate about selective schools and how to get into them rarely rises above a polite murmur in the public domain. But in recent weeks the spotlight has turned sharply on the issue of selective school entry after moves by some old boys from the prestigious government school Sydney Boys' High to devise a way to reassert family involvement in the school's activities, especially for after-hours and weekend sport.

Sydney Boys' High is unusual in that it has a very high proportion of influential men among its alumni and it is the only government school which is part of the Greater Public Schools group of elite private boys' schools - which brings it into competitive proximity to the often rah-rah world of schoolboy rugby and rowing.

Where it's not unusual, as one of the 28 selective schools across Sydney (there is also one each in Newcastle and Wollongong), is that its student population appears in recent years to have become ethnically skewed. To Anglo-Celtic eyes at least, the great majority of each year's intake seems to come from that ill-defined area called "Asia", a vast sweep of humanity that runs from India to North Korea.

Most of the participants in the debate have insisted that race or ethnicity is not in play here. They say the Sydney old boys debate is about differing attitudes among the school population regarding parental involvement in weekend and after-hours sports.

But others see this lament over a lost world of all-rounded "Australian-ness" as simply code for resentment about "Asian-ness" becoming the dominant school ethos. The most recent edition of the old boys' bulletin carried an article quoting an old boy concerned that the demographics of the school were fast evolving with "year 7 currently 90 per cent Asian".

The debate has raged in the letters pages of this newspaper. Some very prominent citizens, including judges and former judges who are old boys of the school, have weighed in.

It has also sent the school into a spin - Sydney Boys' High's Web site is engaged in its own lively debate, complete with calming messages from its well-respected principal, Kim Jagger, as well as letters from anguished parents from Asian backgrounds who feel they've been denigrated.

One Herald letter writer was Sydney High teacher Neil Whitfield debunking the idea that the school was 90 per cent Asian or that "Asian-ness" - whatever that meant - somehow affected student involvement in the school's activities.

Whitfield, who manages the statistics about the language backgrounds of students at the school, noted that 78 per cent of the school population came from a non-English-speaking background (NESB), but that figure covered up to 40 language or dialect groups.

"Sydney Boys' High has long been a school that attracts migrant families who wish to see their sons prosper in their new land," Whitfield wrote.

Hetty Cislowski is a down-to-earth senior bureaucrat in the NSW Department of Education with a hearty laugh and a determination to keep the debate on an even keel. As the department's assistant director-general for secondary education, Cislowski is responsible for selective schools and she picks up Whitfield's refrain. "It's important to recognise that many students who identify as having a non-English background were born here, their parents are Australian citizens, [they] are actively engaged in all aspects of school life and excel in sport, debating, music," Cislowski said yesterday.

She's amused at how easily misconceptions can occur, noting that her European background and that of her husband made their now adult son an NESB at school but acknowledges that it's important to address perceptions as well a reality in the debate. "It's a lot to do with the changing face of Sydney," she said.

The department has dug out figures which show that 10 years ago, 18.7 per cent of the government school population came from an NESB. Five years ago it had risen to 21.5 per cent and last year was 24.8 per cent. These figures need to be treated with some caution because the definition of NESB is that a language other than English may be spoken in the house - including between, say, a mother and a grandmother or a father and an uncle.

Cislowski said that in the selective high school test last year, 35 per cent of the 15,000 candidates were classified NESB. Of all applicants placed in the selective schools, the success rate was 46 per cent NESB.

In certain schools - such as Sydney Boys' High and the high-performing James Ruse High - the proportion is higher. Whitfield noted that the intake into year 7 was just over 86 per cent NESB. But in other selective schools, notably the two outside Sydney, the figure is far lower.

It's certainly acknowledged by teachers that some students who win a place in a selective high occasionally need assistance in remedial English skills for a year or so - a matter of minor dispute between the department and the NSW Teachers Federation, which officially opposes the concept of selective schools even though its members teach within the system.

This factor, and the visual impact (at least to some Australians from British, Irish or European backgrounds) of higher-than-expected concentrations of kids who don't look caucasian, has led some into claiming there's some sort of rort going on.

But as several of the letter writers to the Herald this week have pointed out, there were similar cries heard when bright kids of parents from the great Eastern European Jewish diaspora at the time of World War II were starring in the state's selective high schools.

Perhaps it is as simple as a cyclical phenomenon: relatively new migrants from backgrounds which place a high priority on learning who can't believe their luck at the opportunities on offer if their bright kids simply knuckle down to the task.

One of the more common misconceptions about the selective schools test is that the exam itself is the be-all and end-all of the affair. It's this view which has driven the controversy over the role of coaching colleges.

One chain has 14 centres across Sydney and "coaches" at least 800 year 6 students at about $2000 for the privilege and boasts of how many students it gets into selective schools each year. The colleges' proliferation in recent years has led a number of critics to argue that students are being unfairly tutored in how to maximise their test results. There may be some truth in this.

Certainly the department has been suspicious of the role of coaching colleges and has unsuccessfully tried to persuade parents of bright students that there's no demonstrable benefit in swotting for the tests.

In the past, the department has been so secretive about the issue that it has insisted that every page of every exam paper distributed to the students who attend the intellectual beauty parade each year is carefully numbered and collected at the end of the four-hour sessions held in June.

All are returned under close guard to the headquarters of the Australian Council for Educational Research, where they're computer-processed in secure conditions.

According to the department, only a single copy of the test is kept in NSW under lock and key by a departmental heavyweight.

It's been such a top security issue that there was a scandal in the late 1990s when it was thought one Sydney coaching college had illegally obtained a single copy of the test which it was offering to its students.

The department was reluctant to push the issue, since every bit of publicity appeared to be helping rather than hindering the coaching industry in its claim to provide an inside running for those parents prepared to devote their money and a sizable proportion of their kids' weekends to achieve the Holy Grail.

It has done a complete backflip this year in trying to gazump the coaching factories by putting examples of the multiple choice exams on the department's Web site for the first time. The aim was to offer would-be students a taste of the sort of multiple-choice questions they'd be likely to encounter in the tests.

In fact, the "test" is three tests in one - a 40-minute test in English, including questions in word usage, comprehension, grammar, syntax and spelling; a 40-minute test in mathematics, which includes questions requiring a sophisticated understanding of numbers, dimensions and problem solving; and a 40-minute test in "general ability", which is as close as students get to doing an old-fashioned intelligence test. They're run one after the other and are all multiple choice.

But they're not the only "marks" that the assessors use to cull the ranks of the 11-year-old hopefuls. Of equal weight are the marks given to the student by his or her primary school.

In English and maths, the marks of the tick-box test and a far more subjective school-based assessment are treated as equal.

Despite the remarkably widespread view to the contrary, students can't simply pull off a stunning performance on the day - or fluke a great result by devising some system of chance entry on their multiple-choice exams - to carry them through to a selective high. If they really are plodders, or even very able but not up there with the highly gifted and motivated students, they won't even get to the barrier.

To ensure schools don't artificially inflate marks to give their students a leg-up, a complex system of scaling is employed which ranks the kids within the one school then re-weights their school marks to ensure that they're comparable across schools.

The school and test marks in maths and English are worth 50 marks each (200 marks altogether). All students are treated the same, regardless of background.

There's also a general ability test (GAT), which is marked out of 100. This has been the focus of some controversy because the department allows NESB students who have been in the country for less than four years to opt out of the GAT.

The educational theory behind this exemption is that students who show signs of being gifted but who are still getting their language skills up to speed should at least be given consideration in general ability. Even so, they all have to sit the English test.

Last year, there were 400 students out of 15,000 sitting the tests who fell into that category. In fact, according to the head of the selective schools unit within the department, at least 80 per cent of these students chose to sit the GAT test. In all, 84 of the 400 won a place among the 3300 successful candidates.

Interestingly, that's close to the expected ratio of one successful student out of every five who sit the exam.

Professor Miraca Gross, director of the Gifted Education Research, Resource and Information Centre at the University of NSW, has dealt with gifted students for several decades. She says students selected were not simply those who could successfully complete a "tick-a-box" test.

"It's a kid who's been performing extremely well and able to cope with the advanced and fast-paced work in selective high schools," she said.

Gross said students from immigrant backgrounds - Jewish in earlier years and East Asian in more recent times - shared a common factor, she said. There was almost a worship of work which was nowhere near as evident in students from an Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic background.

"There's a kind of wanting to honour the potential that one has and wanting to take in knowledge - it's almost a worship of learning," she said.

Citing a Confucian notion that it was a pleasure to learn and regularly review things already learnt, Professor Gross said people imbued with a Confucian ethic absorbed education like food and drink.

"For them, learning is not artificially confined to the period of 8.30am to 3.30pm Monday to Friday," she said.

"This is very far from the Australian, laid-back, 'it's cool to be a fool' ... approach."

But Gross had detected a shift in Australian attitudes. "Fifteen years ago it was not the done thing to admit you were bright, or that your kids were bright," she said.